Okay I am fairly certain my swap partion isn't being used. Doing a few different monitors shows no activity. Memory monitors show almost allways almost maxed out. How can I make sure swap is being used, I messed around in linuxconfg but got no where. any ideas are most welcomed. Thanks ahead of time.

I think swap was mainly for older machines that didnt have a lot of RAM. When the cache was filled it would use swap space as memory to hold data. If you have lots of memory in your machine I dont think it would really need to use the swap space unless your running some hefty applications.Windows has something similar to swap, virtual memory, but they just dont use a set space they use the empty space at the end of your drive. I could be wrong though, this is just what my understanding of swap is.

Quick check to see how much memory and swap is being used is the top command. Don't be suprised if most of your memory appears to be being used. Most operating systems grab as much memory as they can so they can manage it.

What Energy said. Don't worry if it isn't using swap space. Swap is a last resort effort. You want it to not use swap space. It's slower then RAM. If you want to see your swap in action. Open up about 5 instances of Mozilla then do a top. You'll see your swap screaming in pain. Another thing, as a rule of thumb. Your swap is supposed to be the same size as your RAM. Or double it. One or the other. I can't remember. : )

now a days with machines that use ~256MB DIMMs and up it should be the same with older machines that use ~16MB SIMMs it should be doubled since it will probably get used alot more. But this isnt a written rule or anything just my opinion your welcome to make your swap space whatever size you like.

Yeah, that's a little excessive IMHO. 512mb of swap would be more than ample unless you plan to continuously run a few big programs at once. More than likely you could even get away with a little less if you wanted.

This is just the rule of thumb. Make sure you keep that in mind. If you aren't going to be a server you probably will never even notice. You probably still wouldn't notice even if you were a server unless you were really running it ragged.